The Future Belongs to the Courageously Curious | Doug Burgum | TEDxFargo
if you could improve your life the lives of your family your friends and your coworkers with a simple little secret would you be curious enough to learn what that is if you found out that implementing the secret was free and in implementing it took less than one minute a day would you even be more curious today nearly every person every school every institution every vehicle every machine and now today all has access to all the world's information this is a profound shift and yet the device that many of us carry that connects us with all the information in the world we still call by a name that's modified but it's still a name that's 140 years old we call it a phone and this profound shift is happening in such an incredible way that that we don't even fully understand all of its implications when we think about society and we think about what we've built over the millennia when we think of the institutions that were designed around the idea that information was scarce and that information was gated and information created value and we built professions we built societies we built titles we built upward mobility we built pay we built everything into a world across medicine and education in law that was dependent on the idea that a rare few would have the information and then others would have to pay for it but today when we have access to all information and that everyone in the world has it it's an incredibly democratizing event and no longer do we have to rely on the rare expert who has the information it's more tied to the ability of every one of us to keep asking the right questions in a world of abundant information we cannot build a working society that's based on the old rigid forms of the idea of scarcity but what is the skill we need to tap into this abundant information and what is our responsibility as as individuals and as parents to build a society that has the tools to deal with deal with this what drives us to be curious about all the information that exists children today are and always have been hardwired with a deep and natural curiosity as parents and citizens it's our job to help people learn to develop the skills around this that we don't need to challenge the existing status quo that exists starting nearly 20 years ago when we were blessed to have three beautiful children a ritual in our family began that when i would drop off any of my kids at the school of ins you know school or institution where they were attending uh the question that we would ask our children was not in the in the parting comments getting out of the car it wasn't about it wasn't about hey get good grades and it wasn't about hey be sure you behave uh because those are things that are awfully more important to the parent that behavior that we try to instill on children in school is often a view of how does it reflect on us they get good grades and behave then i'm going to appear as a good parent as parents we have to let go of that what's important for our children today is less about grades and less about behavior and it's more about the questions they learn to ask and so when our kids were dropped off the question was ask good questions that was the statement get out of the car ask good questions and when they would get home at night the question was what was the best question that you asked today at school what was the best question you asked today and it turns out that your children and your friends don't even have to be in school to engage in this this dialogue and this ritual in this habit as a family because you can challenge each other every day even with adult children to say what was the best question you asked today and and that's that's a habit and so the future if you will belongs to one group and it belongs to the curious and it belongs to the people who are willing to keep asking those questions and what do we get when we have that curiosity we expand our empathy for others we reduce the barriers and the strife of the world because we start understanding where other people are literally coming from to be able to understand and we seek to understand what's behind and what's driving their decisions and their comments and their beliefs so we get beyond the stereotypes and the sound bites continuous curiosity not just about others but how about ourselves because our own behaviors the comments that we make that we may wish we hadn't the acts that we've done in our life let's get curious ourselves about our own capability and and how we fit into the world and we also need to be curious about society itself because we set so many limits on ourselves starting with the idea that everything is scarce we're in a world today of low prices because we have more energy and we have more food than ever before i spent my whole life growing up with people telling me that by the time i reached this age the world would be out of food and out of energy and yet the low prices we're experiencing is because of that abundance that we have and as citizens living in a world where where we pay taxes and we contribute to solutions we should be demandingly curious about well-meaning people both inside and outside of government believe that money will solve societal ills when we have decades and decades of proof that money does not cure those problems great curiosity takes great courage and curiosity trains us to do one very important thing because if you're curious you need to have to be able to listen you have to be able to truly listen to another person and listen without judgment so i challenge all of you that are here today to rediscover your childlike curiosity begin simply with a simple less than one minute a day task and that is with intention you know what is the best question that you ask today ask it to your kids ask it to your partner you know ask it to your best friend and importantly if if there's someone in your in your world a parent a grandparent a great grandparent that might be still alive ask them questions while they're still here and you still have the opportunity to learn from them and their wisdom and so tonight when you leave here before you go to bed ask yourself what was the best question i asked today stay curious my friends and let's begin transforming our world one courageously curious question at a time thank you you